


Between cocaine and ambition

by fandomnumbergenerator



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drug Use, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 05:19:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1292857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomnumbergenerator/pseuds/fandomnumbergenerator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Notes on drug use in Sherlock BBC and the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories (heavily influenced by Mike Jay's analysis of the Victorian understanding of cocaine use in <em>Emperors of Dreams</em>).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between cocaine and ambition

"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sign of satisfaction." (The Sign of Four, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1890)

For 120 years, Sherlock Holmes has been the archetype of a particular kind of brilliant drug user, whose overclocked brain comes with its own peculiar weaknesses, “a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces” (The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge, 1908). But this was an aspect of the Sherlock Holmes stories that had been purposely left out of the current BBC adaptation, except for various too-clever-but-ultimately-deniable allusions — nicotine patches on inner elbow and the fake/not-fake drugs bust in ASiP, the Danger Night and rifling of the sock index in ASiB, and the ambiguous, “John, I need some. Get me some,” in THoB (as well as Sherlock’s essentially meaningless “7% stronger” quip — pharmaceutical cocaine is now sold as a 4 or 10, not 7%, solution).

Until we get to His Last Vow, and “The Man with the Twisted Lip” scene, where John Watson goes to find a family friend at an opium den (modernized as an abandoned building, full of people immobile on dirty mattresses) and finds Sherlock, who is not just disguised as an opiate user, but we come to learn (via Molly’s violent freak-out) has apparently has been on one or more drugs at some point in the last few days. It is left somewhat ambiguous as to whether he is actually high in the scene. He seems bleary and emotional (storming out of the squat yelling, later pinning Mycroft to the wall in an arm lock, growling “don’t appall me when I’m high”), but within the range of the altered state that is Sherlock-in-a-pissy-mood, and certainly nowhere near as impaired as when he was drunk in TSo3. Though we have no real frame of reference for how Sherlock-on-drugs would act. He is definitely in disguise — with unflattering clothes and hair and some kind of makeup (which becomes clear when we see his transformation after a bath). He says that he’s under cover, but that’s not really true — though he’s on a case, he seems to be the opposite of under cover. (“There’s every chance that my drug habit might hit the newspapers. The game is on.”) His goal is to be discovered by Magnussen, to plant drug use as his pressure point, presumably so Magnussen will underestimate him. (Though it ends up somewhat garbled, showing up on his pressure point list as “opium” which must be some kind of typo, because where would Sherlock find raw opium in the UK?)

In terms of what drug(s) Sherlock actually tested positive for, from the spoon being heated over a lighter, John’s use of the word “smackheads” before he goes into the squat (though I hate to hear a doctor talking like that), and Isaac Whitney’s confusion and slurred speech, we are meant to assume that Whitney is on heroin. And the implication is that Sherlock is too. If you accept Sherlock’s assertion that the drug use is for a case, my guess is that he was smoking heroin (the most common form of heroin in UK is brown base, which is easily smoked, but requires citric acid or vitamin C to dissolve for injection), since smoking is safer than injection (less risk of overdose and infectious disease) and probably less triggering for someone with a history of injection. Though that is maybe an overestimate of how careful and calculating Sherlock is likely to be, once he’s decided to actually do drugs, instead of faking it.

We also see Sherlock taking morphine after he is shot by Mary, and a number of fans have commented that the doctors shouldn’t have given him prescription opiates, considering his history. But I think that is a gross misunderstanding of the use of pain medication in emergency situations. What else are you going to give a gunshot victim? It’s not like we have a lot of viable alternatives for the management of overwhelming pain. It’s true that Sherlock does spend a lot of time harassing people (Mrs. Hudson, the paramedics) for morphine, but this must be for show. Sherlock is smart enough to know that asking for opiates by name is going to lower the chances of anyone actually giving them to you. So, while it was incredibly irresponsible to leave the hospital early (and it does indeed land him back in the hospital), I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from his use of morphine for acute pain. Though Sherlock himself seems to be trying to manipulate Janine’s and Magnussen’s perceptions of his reliance on pain medication by purposely upping his dose in their presence (we see him turning his morphine drip back down as soon as Janine leaves him alone in his hospital room)

In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock’s use of cocaine is graphically described, and his use of morphine is alluded to. Both drugs were legal at that point, and, if I understand right, drinking them in patents medicines was socially acceptable, but injecting was definitely seen as abnormal. It is also worth noting that when Conan Doyle talks about Sherlock’s “sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks,” he’s referring to subcutaneous injection (because IV technique was very rare, medically or recreationally, until the 20th century). Subcutaneous injection or skin popping causes a lot of tissue damage and increases the risk of abscess, and is pretty much only done by accident now.

In an interesting analysis of what Sherlock’s drug use meant to Victorian audiences, Mike Jay says in _Emperors of Dreams_ , “The inner Holmes, as well as the outer, was faithfully conceived around the bohemian stereotype. He is solitary, and haunted by an existential darkness – the ‘black moods’ which come over him, his bipolar swings from insomnia or focused, obsessive, day-and-night work to his days and weeks ‘in the dumps’, when he doesn’t ‘open my mouth for days on end’. For a doctor like Conan Doyle, this would have been a recognised medical syndrome associated with the highly-strung, neurasthenic ‘type’, the febrile ‘brain-workers’ who were increasingly identified in the medical literature as a high-risk group for drug abuse.” In modern terms, this would be a “self-medicating” model of drug use.

In a show with an almost willful refusal to go into back story, the fandom has tried to fill in the details. Despite the fandom’s amazing work in so many areas, a lot of the characterizations of drug use in fanfic ring false to me. People have a lot of different experiences around drugs, and I wouldn’t want to discount anyone else’s experiences. But when a description of drugs seems to be coming out of poor research and reliance on stereotype, it upsets me, particularly when it touches on issues of stigma and agency. As someone with a history of drug use, I am disturbed by fics in which John (a doctor) uses the word junkie, or any scene where John locks Sherlock in his room and tends to him while he forces him to detox and Sherlock is grateful (which seems to be bordering on kidnapping).

In the Conan Doyle stories the quality of Sherlock’s drug use changes as the stories go on, as popular, medical and legal ideas about drug use changed (and when Conan Doyle wanted to get his work published in an American magazine with a strongly anti-cocaine editorial policy), from an eccentricity (one more way in which he doesn’t conform to social norms) to a disease, a “drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career” (The Adventure of the Missing Three Quarter, 1904). But in BBC Sherlock we’re given basically no information about Sherlock’s past relationship with drugs. The rough consensus in the fandom seems to be: a history of IV cocaine (sometimes heroin) use, which was still going on when he met Lestrade, and that at some point before ASiP, Mycroft (“I’ll be mother”) had intervened, but in a way that further alienated Sherlock, kept him in the position of child that needed to be looked after, and that this is part of the background of their current strained relationship.

But without an official back story, we have no context within the show for how to interpret Sherlock’s drug use in HLV. A popular interpretation is that it is result of his feeling abandoned by John after his wedding, mirroring the penultimate line in The Sign of the Four, When Sherlock responds to John’s question, “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?” with, “For me there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” Another interpretation is that Sherlock is hiding from his fake girlfriend, Janine, the pressure of constantly performing intimacy having become too much for him.

The information that we do get from the show — John saying, “If you were anywhere near this kind of thing again, you could have called, you could have talked to me,” Mycroft referring to “The siren call of old habits,” and saying it “Won’t be the first time that your substance abuse has wreaked havoc with their [the parents’] line-dancing,” — is ambiguous, since Mycroft is being a dick (was the jab at the cross-dressing uncle really necessary?) and John has clearly been avoiding Sherlock. And I think that you also have to discount anything that Janine and Magnussen say about Sherlock’s drug use, since they are clearly the targets of his manipulation.

Later in HLV, Sherlock tells John, “Your best friend is a sociopath who solves crimes as an alternative to getting high. That’s me by the way…Hello!” I don’t think this statement, made in the context of trying to manipulate John into taking Mary back (as part of the “It’s your fault all your loved ones are lying assholes” speech) should be taken at face value. We know that, whatever his interpersonal issues, Sherlock is not a sociopath and that he uses the self-diagnosis as a mask or defense mechanism, so his assessment of himself as someone who “solves crimes as an alternative to getting high” is probably also a kind of mask.

I personally think that Sherlock’s arc is less “replacing one addiction with another” (a major trope in Elementary, which adheres closely to a 12-step model of drug addiction and recovery), than finding his calling. (Not that his relationship to his work or his body or his friends could ever really be called healthy.) But in a pattern that is probably familiar to a lot of people, his drug use gives way to his passion for his work. I think Oliver Sacks (weird genius with period table themed stuff all over his home and a history of drug use) is a reasonable comparison. I particularly like this quote from a Maia Szalavitz article, “Sacks found in writing an alternative source of pleasure and purpose. His ability to take joy in this work—even when it was not his primary source of income—replaced the ‘vapid mania of amphetamines’; more critically, writing was more meaningful than taking drugs.”

This is the flip side of how Sherlock describes his drug use in The Sign of the Four “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”

When I originally read Moffat quoted in 2010 as saying, “I think you’d have to ask the question, would a man like Sherlock Holmes be a coke addict today? In Victorian times everybody was taking some kind of drug, largely because there was no such thing as a painkiller. It is a very different thing to say that Sherlock Holmes is a coke addict now,” it really bugged me. I read it as, “I cannot imagine someone who is very smart, someone who is successful in their field, ever having done drugs.” (Because even in the original stories, Holmes is only actively using drugs in a A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, and Watson spends the rest of the stories worrying about him.) But, unless Moffat literally meant that he couldn’t imagine Holmes using cocaine (but that heroin was fine), it turns out it was just another example of misdirection to hide upcoming plot twists.

**Author's Note:**

> Dialogue from http://arianedevere.livejournal.com/tag/sherlock%20episode%20transcript
> 
> And these gif sets:
> 
> http://mikkelsem.tumblr.com/post/73230310317
> 
> http://gaytectives.tumblr.com/post/73152701940/mycroft-dont-say-another-word-just-go-he-could
> 
> http://professorfangirl.tumblr.com/post/73224494158/of-course-hes-been-using-again-i-dont-think
> 
> http://cloudywithachanceofbuckbeak.tumblr.com/post/73161345887/sherlock-holmes-can-read-most-people-like-a-book
> 
> ...
> 
> Find me at worn-smooth.tumblr.com


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